Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

In the 19th century there were calls to invent a new architecture for the 19th century, that did not involve dressing buildings up in styles derived from the buildings of earlier centuries. Why couldn’t there be an original ‘19th-century’ style? Viollet-le-Duc for example argued that the new architecture would derive from the new ways of constructing buildings. It did not happen convincingly until the 20th century was already under way, and people like Mies and Le Corbusier devised ways of making architecture look as if it had shaken off historical ornament in order to adopt a modern way of doing things, using new materials — the steel frame and the concrete slab. It seemed as if they had managed to fulfil the 19th-century prophecies, which were by then deeply ingrained in the culture of architecture. Their ways of thinking became mainstream among architects during the middle part of the 20th century. The architecture of the generation before them is particularly interesting, because people then were trying to reinvent architecture without it having settled into the path that became orthodox modernism, from which point everyone seemed to reach a consensus about how things should be done. Le Corbusier’s masterstroke was to claim that the machine had taken over from the traditional craftsman, and that therefore mass-produced objects were legitimate style-icons. At the Paris Exposition of 1925, he designed a little pavilion, ‘le pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau’ (the New Spirit) — named after the journal l’Esprit Nouveau in which Le Corbusier published his manifesto-like writings. The pavilion was supposed to be a prototype apartment for a vast city composed of many such units, stacked up into towers. He furnished it with mass produced furniture, along with Cubist-influenced paintings that he had painted himself. If it looks rather plain and routine now, then that is a measure of the influence it has had. It stood in marked contrast with the most sustained efforts of the previous generation, such as Victor Horta and Hector Guimard, who developed the Art Nouveau style, based on plant forms. Horta’s work in particular involved painstaking craftsmanship — the elaborate swirling shapes sometimes looked as if a building and its furniture had softened and slumped, and sometimes seemed to be sending out tendrils of fresh growth. Timber and stone did not naturally come in the right shapes, which had to be carved, so Horta and the people who worked in his studio made plaster models of the novel forms, and then they were copied by the joiners and masons working on the building. This was an expensive process, so Horta’s version of the Art Nouveau was initially only for the super-rich who could afford it — the aristocracy in the then-new Belgian state, who wanted to patronize a new architecture as a Belgian national style. Hector Guimard is best known for the entrances that he designed for the Paris Métro, which have droopily heavy-looking flower heads, with dull red lights that glow mysteriously. They seem to beckon the traveller into a dreamworld, rather than into an efficient transport system, but in their fabrication they were highly rational and depended not on individual craftsmanship but on repeated castings in iron from moulds. The imagery may look soporific, but the means of production was efficient.